A trove of the late artist’s rarely seen photographs comes out of hiding and enters the market

See examples of Hollis Frampton's photography

By Bruce Adams

Perched inconspicuously on a storeroom shelf at the Anthology
Film Archives in New York City is a cardboard storage box labeled
simply Number 6. It’s one of 10 boxes listed on an inventory
of equipment and materials preserved from the University at Buffalo
workspace of the late avant-garde filmmaker, photographer, writer,
digital art pioneer and UB professor Hollis Frampton.

According to the inventory, box six contains 40 floppy disks,
though in point of fact it’s nearly 200. The data on the
fragile eight-inch disks cannot be accessed by today’s
computers; it must be retrieved through a meticulous recovery
process. For the moment their contents remain a mystery.

“Knowing Frampton’s work in the development of new
hardware and software for digital manipulation of video, the
presence of the disks alludes to potentially hundreds of files of
early digital artworks and video clips,” says Sean Donaher,
the executive director and curator of CEPA Gallery
in Buffalo. Such a discovery would be something of a holy grail to
the art world.

Donaher and his staff, in conjunction with fine art dealer Dean
Brownrout Modern/Contemporary, are eagerly preparing for what
promises to be a comprehensive exhibition and unprecedented sale of
Frampton’s photography. Simply titled “Hollis
Frampton,” the show, to open June 20 and run through the
summer, will include work never before presented in a gallery
setting. Pre-exhibition buzz caught the attention of nearby media
arts center Squeaky Wheel, which is partnering with CEPA to present
a simultaneous exhibition about Frampton’s time at UB’s
Digital Arts Lab (DAL), while the Western New York Book Arts Center
plans a third exhibit of Frampton objects and ephemera. Other
events include lectures, screenings, an outdoor live
concert/screening of the experimental film “Zorns
Lemma” at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, a DAL roundtable
featuring former colleagues and students of Frampton from around
the country, and a final live concert and screening of his last
work, “Magellan,” amid the grain elevators of Silo
City.

The mystery disks, along with a vast cache of sundry materials
supplied by the artist’s stepson, Will Faller Jr., have led
the curatorial team down unforeseen paths. “When I came to
Buffalo in 1989 to study photography and printmaking at UB, I was
aware only of Frampton’s 16mm film work, and even that in a
peripheral sense,” says Donaher. “It was really only
when we started digging into the research for this exhibition that
I truly began to understand the scope of his genius.”

A wagon full of books

Hollis Frampton by Marion Faller, 1975

That word genius pops up often when people talk about Frampton.
It’s a term perhaps bandied about too freely today, but the
artist’s penetrating intelligence (and innate bullheadedness)
were evident early on. Born at the peak of the Great Depression,
the son of a poor Ohio coal minor, young Frampton seldom spoke.
“Borderline autistic” is how he described himself. The
adult library card he acquired by age 6 nourished his insatiable
appetite for books; a fresh batch packed his Radio Flyer wagon each
Saturday. Hard science was the first of many passions.

Storied accounts of his early days abound. At 7, with his
grandfather, he created a rudimentary “movie” by
pasting catalog images to a belt connected to a hand-cranked
phonograph motor. Before age 10, tests revealed he had a mental age
above 18, getting him sprung from special education classes. Placed
among gifted students, the uncommunicative boy studied French, the
second of eight languages he would eventually speak.

Frampton’s first scholarship at age 10 was for life
drawing classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. At 15 he applied on
his own to the prestigious Phillips Academy and received a full
scholarship. After he graduated from Phillips, Harvard offered him
a scholarship and then rescinded it when he intentionally blew a
history test, ultimately failing to graduate.

The headstrong student, in his words, “allowed [himself]
to be admitted” to Western Reserve University in Cleveland on
the condition that he not be required to take courses he felt were
irrelevant. The school agreed, but after Frampton amassed 135
credit hours, he was informed that he needed three
“irrelevant” courses to complete a bachelor’s
degree. So he left without one. He moved to Washington, D.C., where
he visited the aging poet Ezra Pound almost daily in St.
Elizabeth’s Hospital. Then, in 1958, he relocated to New York
to pursue photography. Over the next decade or so, he documented
artist friends, including Carl Andre, Frank Stella, Larry Poons,
James Rosenquist and John Chamberlain. Some of these photographs
are included in the CEPA exhibition.

“My predicament was that of a committed illusionist in an environment that was officially dedicated to the eradication of illusion.”

Hollis Frampton

“I didn’t find it a picnic to be a photographer
through the ’60s,” recalled Frampton in a 1979
interview, “not because photography was disregarded, although
of course that was true, but because my predicament was that of a
committed illusionist in an environment that was officially
dedicated to the eradication of illusion and, of course, utterly
dominated by painting and sculpture.” Avant-garde filmmaking
was about to take off in New York, and by the mid-’60s
Frampton was a leading artist and theoretical prophet in the field,
for which he is now best known.

“Hollis Frampton wasn’t just one of the great
experimental filmmakers; he was a model for 21st-century art
makers,” says Peter Lunenfeld (MA ’88), professor and
vice chair of UCLA Design Media Arts, and one of many current media
experts who got their start at UB’s Center for Media Study
(now the Department of Media Study), which Frampton
helped design. “He combined the four major waves of optical
media in one career, moving from photography to cinema, to video,
to digital media.”

Indeed, Frampton was one of the earliest explorers of audio and
visual digital media, writing and testing hundreds of computer
programs, and formulating dozens of hardware devices, to produce a
computing environment useful for the arts. This groundbreaking
technology included a frame buffer that enabled images to be stored
on any computer and manipulated in real time, something not
previously possible. Together with media artist Woody Vasulka he
created UB’s Digital Arts Lab, which implemented and further
developed these emerging technologies. The DAL was soon serving
students from various departments throughout the university.

“It was the first program in the country devoted to the
study of digital arts,” says Tony Conrad, a SUNY
Distinguished Professor in Media Study who taught alongside
Frampton in the early days of the department. “That was at a
time when students built their own computers out of mail-order
kits; everyone had a different idea of what could be done with the
unexplored turf of ‘digital art.’”

One word per second

Hollis Frampton by Marion Faller, 1972.

Frampton was brought to UB in 1973 by Gerald O’Grady, the
first member of a renowned community of groundbreaking filmmakers
and videographers at the university, including, in addition to
Conrad and the husband-wife team of Woody and Steina Vasulka, James
Blue, Paul Sharits and Peter Weibel. (This era is documented in the
massive tome “Buffalo
Heads,” published in 2008 by MIT Press.) “I did my
master’s after [Frampton’s] death,” says
Lunenfeld. “So I never knew him, but in those days it was
impossible not to know of him. I’ll never forget the
first time I saw his masterpieces ‘Nostalgia’ and
‘Zorns Lemma.’ They proved to me that he was a protean
artist; the intersections of sound and image he created stay with
me.”

“Zorns Lemma” (1970), named after a proposition in
mathematical set theory, is arguably Frampton’s most
important work. The film begins in darkness with a woman reciting
from an archaic reading primer used for teaching the alphabet. The
central part is silent, as the 24-letter Latin alphabet repeatedly
flashes on the screen, one letter at a time in one-second
intervals. With each sequence, a new letter is swapped with a
random image until the entire alphabet is replaced. The final
segment is an extended shot of a man, woman and dog walking into
the snowy distance as several alternating voices recite a passage
from “On Light, or the Ingression of Forms” by Robert
Grosseteste—one word per second.

London-Salisbury train by Marion Faller, 1972

Entire treatises have been written on “Zorns Lemma.”
Some see it as a “cryptic autobiography,” in which
young Frampton learns verbal language, moves to New York and
progresses from verbal to visual language, and then departs for the
countryside. (In 1974 he moved to a farmhouse in Eaton, N.Y., with
his wife, photographer Marion Faller, and her son.) There are plenty
of alternative readings. With its filmic temporality, system of
order and substitution, and references to fire, water, air and
earth, there may be an elemental truth encoded into its dense and
resonant structure that supports a diversity of metaphoric and
transcendent interpretations. You don’t so much watch
“Zorns Lemma” for the enjoyment of watching; you watch
it for the gratification of thinking about it later.

Frampton is widely known as a pioneer of structural film, a term
he felt lacked sufficient specificity to describe his work.
Influenced by Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that “the
medium is the message,” structural filmmakers explore the
material properties of film itself—fundamentally a series of
24 still images per second arranged in some order—rather than
focusing on narrative and other cinematic conventions.
Frampton’s films were often based on mathematical or
scientific concepts. In 2012, much of his work was released on
Blu-ray and DVD by the Criterion
Collection. He was also known as a prolific and erudite
theorist, and selections of his writings, collectively titled
“On the Camera Arts and Consecutive
Matters,” were published in book form by MIT Press in
2009 and reprinted this year.

“Hollis was a deep well of knowledge in a spread of fields
that carpeted the humanities and sciences alike,” says
Conrad. “A class or conversation with [him] was always
sprinkled with sparkling witticisms, critical twists and original
thoughts shooting in all directions.”

One of Frampton’s noted conceptual constructs was the
“infinite cinema,” composed of all film of any kind
ever made. A “metaphor for consciousness,” he once
called it, which postulated that all cameras, projectors and film
are part of an enormous single machine that powers the infinite
cinema. “A still photograph is simply an isolated frame taken
out of the infinite cinema,” he explained.

Flying cabbage and soy sauce pistols

Hollis Frampton by Marion Faller, 1974

Frampton continued making these “isolated frames”
throughout his life, frequently in collaboration with Faller, who
was also, says Brownrout, a “meticulous steward” of
Frampton’s work until her death in 2014. “She made sure
much of his artwork, films and personal archives are preserved in
museums and institutions across the country.” Little of this
work has previously been available for purchase. With growing
international interest in the artist in recent years, Brownrout and
Frampton’s estate agreed that now is the time to make this
work available.

Safe to say, Donaher concurred. “My entire presentation
[to Donaher] consisted of two words,” recalls Brownrout:
“Hollis Frampton.” Donaher’s immediate response:
“How does summer 2015 sound?” The exhibition will cut
across the broad spectrum of Frampton’s photographic output,
including early documentary photos and images used in
“Nostalgia” and “Zorns Lemma.”

Also included will be examples from the series “ADSVMVS
ABSVMVS,” in which objects, plants and dried animals are
photographed against a black background, like scientific specimens.
Each is exhaustively documented with deadpan earnestness in the
accompanying text. “Frampton’s sense of humor is widely
evident throughout his work, both in title and topic,” says
Brownrout. “[His] works with found objects…or throwing
a typewriter into a burn pile in the woods and calling it a
sculpture entitled ‘Torments [Tortures] of the Text,’
follows a conceptual path started by Duchamp.”

“A class or conversation with him was always sprinkled with sparkling witticisms, critical twists and original thoughts shooting in all directions.”

Tony Conrad

“Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion”—a
series done with Faller—depicts vegetables shot in rapid
sequence against a gridded backdrop, similar to the motion studies
of pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge. “Zucchini
squash encountering sawhorse,” for example, shows a
particularly large zucchini slamming against a wooden sawhorse,
with predictable results. “Savoy cabbage flying” is
doubly ironic since the camera follows the subject, in direct
opposition to the customary stationary lens and grid.
“Watermelon falling” beat David Letterman to the
gag.

When color copiers were new, rare and prohibitively expensive,
Frampton was invited to Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse to make
art using one, much as Andy Warhol used serigraphy when it was
still considered a commercial medium. In his “By Any Other
Name” series, the artist copies various food labels,
assigning witty misreadings of the packaging (e.g., “Thick
Soy Sauce Brand Pistols”) to the cheerfully banal pop
imagery. Frampton considered Xerox, like photography, to be a
“democratic medium” that should be accessible to the
general public. Now, for the first time, these will be.

Frampton died of lung cancer in 1984 at age 48. His final years
at UB were spent working on his unfinished “Magellan”
project (a film intended to be viewed in daily segments over 371
days) busily writing computer software programs to organize images
for this work. Among other things, Frampton was perhaps one of the
first people to understand the potential of the computer as
personal creative instrument. He once wrote: “As an image
tool, however, it is still young. However, we’re optimistic.
Things have their natural time, they come and go.”

The same could be said for people. “When Hollis was
here,” says Conrad, “he did nothing but smoke, drink
beer and hack ceaselessly at his computer programs.” The
lifestyle took its toll, and Frampton’s natural time was cut
short. Donaher sums up what many others have said: “It makes
you pause and wonder what his impact on the field would be today if
he hadn’t died so young.”

A Selection of Frampton's Photographic Works

Long ago and far away, there was a magical place called the
Digital Arts Lab or DAL for short - on the Main Street campus of
UB. It was run by a mad man named Hollis Frampton.

It looked and felt almost identical to Buffalo Labs, but was
smaller. I hung out there and built my first (working) computer
from a bare circuit board and components. It had 2 8" floppy drives
that held a huge 250kB each and cost $400 a piece and it ran
CP/M.

Others there were working on building a frame buffer from
scratch or writing a large image processing system called Imago
(written all in Z80 assembler - I don't believe it was ever
finished.)

A couple of other people were composing music on their CP/M
computer using hexadecimal input. They liked it because it
corresponded naturally to 16th notes.

It was really a makerspace, but, AFAIK, the term had not yet
been invented.

John Marfoglia

Great writing, really looking forward to seeing the show.

Ilene Dube (BA '75)

Reading Bruce Adams' piece on Hollis Frampton brought me back to
my days at UB when, as a media studies minor, I took a class with
Paul Sharits. In the middle of class, he excused himself for about
20 minutes to write an idea in his notebook. It was one of the most
memorable moments of my education, learning to capture an idea
while it was in the air. Although I was there during Frampton's
reign, and inspired by him, I only got to take a class with one of
his graduate assistants. Those were great days, studying film
criticism with Dwight Macdonald and creative writing with Raymond
Federman. Articles like this help keep the memories alive.

Lynette Miller (MFA '90, BFA '87)

What little I knew about Hollis Frampton (other than that he was
the late husband of my beloved professor, the late Marion Faller)
was that he was an artist so avant-garde that no one quite knew how
to categorize him, much less understand his work and its relevance.
Thanks to Bruce Adams for an interesting, illuminating and
insightful article.

David Lee, MA '79

I am looking forward to reading this article more carefully.
However, after a quick scan of it, I would like to comment on
Hollis Frampton. I came to UB for graduate work at the Center
for Media Studies, in the late 1970s. It had been my good
luck to already receive much recognition for my film work. Further,
the Center offered me their one teaching fellowship.

Now, many decades later, I remain engaged as film/dvd maker.
However, no thanks to the Center for Media Studies (that did give
me a degree with a 4.0). No thanks to Hollis or the other arrogant
professors. They are/were undeserving of their extreme self-love
and did their best to discourage students.

I am grateful that I did recover some sanity after my misfortune at
UB. After UB, I put much energy into healthcare to the very
underserved in my country, Latin America, and southern Africa. In
part, I was trying to atone for damage that was directed at most
students by Frampton and his colleagues.

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